Bear Witness (Out of Line collection)

by Mary Gaitskill

  The worst thing that happened in class wasn’t anything Mark did. But it made me feel something for him again, in a way that stayed with me and influenced me, maybe, to go easy when my father asked me about him. I’d given them an assignment that required them to split up into pairs and interview each other, and I wouldn’t let Tyrone pair with Mark because the last time they had, it had been a disaster. Tyrone was furious and also embarrassed because obviously no one wanted to partner with him. He started yelling in front of the class, and when I told him to report to the principal, he came toward me so threateningly that I put up my hands like to fight him. It was reflexive and not smart; it made him come at me harder. The whole class exploded in scared noise, but what I heard was Mark, his voice high and soft like when he was little, going, “Ty, no!” But Ty kept coming; he knocked me back with a chest bump. I swiped at him, don’t even remember if I connected. Then a couple of the boys were on him, pulling him away from me, and it was over. Mark wasn’t one of those boys. But it’s him, his voice, that I remember most.

  I talked to another teacher about it, and he said something that also stayed with me. I can’t quote him exactly, but it was something like, boys like Mark have the potential to go so much worse than somebody like Tyrone. Tyrone’s not complicated; it’s all on the surface with him. You’re right about Mark; inside he’s gentle. If he feels it’s not okay to be that way, he’ll cut off from his own core. He’ll do it to survive. But he’ll be lost, no center, no map. He’ll go really bad.

  I don’t know why I even think back on this. And I don’t, I don’t really think. These things just flash in my mind. Maybe I’m trying to explain it to myself. Or trying to make myself feel better, remembering him as a little boy. But it doesn’t work.

  After lunch, the rapist’s friend Jack testified. He was a good-looking man in his forties and he knew it: he made his entrance in tight black jeans and a black leather jacket, swaggering sideways and smiling like a boy. He was the guy who’d taken over the shop when the victim’s father had died and who had later rehired Mark Carter, whom he described as a “great guy.” The prosecutor asked if Mr. Carter had indeed come to visit him on the Saturday evening that Ms. Pietrisinski was attacked. Jack made a show of thinking and said, Maybe yes, maybe no, I don’t think too clearly on a Saturday night; he smiled broadly and glanced at the jury when he said that. The prosecutor wondered if Jack and Mr. Carter were on friendly footing with Ms. Pietrisinski—did they get along? Jack shrugged and said sure, except sometimes she bitched about cars blocking her driveway. And sometimes it got on their nerves to hear her “screaming at her cat” and listening to the TV turned up so loud he knew what was happening on The Bachelor without ever even seeing it—he glanced at the jury again when he said that last bit and smirked as if sharing a well-known joke. Was he aware of any past history or any ill feeling between Mr. Carter and Ms. Pietrisinski? A little yes, a little no. Mark mentioned he’d had her as a teacher but that was about a hundred years ago and they didn’t talk about it. Did Mark Carter, to his knowledge, own a neoprene dog mask? Yeah, Mark had a dog mask, man that thing was scary! It was all black and cool looking, and sometimes, at the end of the day, they’d close up the shop and get drunk and play death metal and Mark would put on the mask and chase him around the store barking! He smiled and his joker’s eye drifted again over the jury pool.

  Sexy G made a quiet noise of disbelief.

  After our father died, my health got worse. I was fifty-nine, with diabetes, fibromyalgia, Sjögren’s, and stenosis, all of which got worse that year. I retired with disability, but it wasn’t much. My sister had been living in the apartment over Daddy’s shop ever since she got laid off from her job at Bayer; he charged her just enough to cover water and utilities, and that was good because she could only find work as a grocery bagger. When Daddy died the first guy who took over the shop was a friend of his, and so he didn’t charge my sister much more than what she’d been paying, but still she was glad to have me move in. Especially because with me paying half she could eventually afford a cheap computer to go online and look for men—and she was fifty-five! She was on that thing constantly, I thought making a fool of herself, but it worked: she picked out the ones she thought were worth a try, then spent the afternoon in Starbucks interviewing them. Finally one, a nice guy named Mick, worked out, and she moved to his house in Millvale. Soon after that my father’s friend retired and his nephew Jack took over. His father made him promise not to raise the rent, and for a long time he didn’t. Then Mark showed up again and the rent went up fifty dollars. I thought about moving, but I couldn’t find anything I could afford.

  Now I’m with my sister in Millvale, sleeping on a cot in the utility room; my cat, Zylpha, has her dish and her box in the corner. She sleeps under the blanket with me every night, anxiously purring and kneading me. I stayed in Millvale for a week before I could even go back and get my things. My sister and her boyfriend went with me. We went on a Friday because it had happened on a Saturday. I knew Jack would be there, but I didn’t know how bad it would be to see him. I just didn’t think about it, maybe because I usually didn’t see him on Fridays—it tended to be a busy day for them, so he’d be inside working.

  But when we got there, he came out. He popped out the door right as we were going up the stairs. He said, “Can I help you?” Talking to my sister’s boyfriend like he didn’t even see me and then—“Oh, hello, Miz P, are you back?” I began to tremble. He smiled like a malicious kid. Not really understanding yet, Mick said, “Excuse us,” and we kept going, except I was trembling so badly my sister had to support me. She said, “Help her, Mick,” and he took my arm.

  I told Jack she used to be my teacher and that I used to look up her dress while she was reading. He laughed his ass off and it became a whole thing, usually when we were bored and just hanging out after closing and The Bachelor was coming through the ceiling again. He made fun of me for being turned on by older women, he said my foxy girlfriend was way too young for me. We said how nasty it would be to look up her dress now, he would be like, come on, you know you want to, I dare you to go up there and get with her. It was a joke! Even though I started to think about Pietrisinski when I was with Lindy. Not like doing it to her, but I’d pretend she was in the corner in lingerie, posing for me. Sometimes I pretended she looked like she used to. Sometimes I pictured her like now.

  As soon as we got into my place, I had to go to the bathroom. My sister tried to walk me in, but I shook her off before we got to the bedroom. The punched-in door was still broken off one hinge, and bits of yellow police tape were stuck in the wood. I used the toilet with no feeling of privacy. I washed my hands and remembered his fist coming through the door. I looked at the sink and thought how I’d never use my toothbrush there or wash my face and turn off the light and go to sleep in my old bed. I had my hearing aid in so I could hear what they were saying in the other room. Mick said, “I think I’m going to go tell that son of a bitch downstairs to stay in his hole when we come back down.” He said, “If I was younger, I’d beat the shit out of him.” It’s what my father would say. It’s what my father would do. I pictured my father standing there, turning his face away, knowing this had happened in his place and there was nothing he could do. That’s when I felt the anger.

  Finally the old woman testified. She looked really old, older than sixty-three—Moira would’ve guessed ten years older. Her back was bent, and she hobbled rather than walked. But her face was tough; she dyed her hair dark brown and wore it in an old-school pageboy bob. Her chin was pointed and square at the same time, almost rocky. And her voice was tough. Moira was moved by her toughness. She said that it did not occur to her that the man who beat down a door to get to her was there to rape her; she assumed he wanted money. She’d told him where her purse was, and that’s when he produced the wadded-up lingerie. She just stared at it in confusion; she couldn’t believe it when he indicated with hand motions that he wanted her to put the things on. Because the
terrible mask covered his entire head and because he did not speak, she still did not know him. The prosecutor asked, “Do you know who he is now? Can you tell us his name?” The old woman drew herself up; her voice rang when she spoke. “Mark Carter,” she said, and her lip curled with contempt as she said the name. “He’s Mark Carter, and he raped me on my father’s ground.”

  The last person to appear was Mark Carter. He didn’t appear in person. The detective who’d interrogated him brought in an audiotape of his statement and played it for them. The tape was of poor quality, but you could hear his voice very clearly. He sounded friendly and easygoing. He sounded much younger than fifty. He sounded like a teenager.

  The detective didn’t play the entire interview. He only played the very end. The jury heard him ask Mark: “So I just want to be sure the people know. We’ve treated you right, haven’t we? We haven’t forced you to say anything or even pressured you, right?”

  “No, no,” answered Mark warmly. “You guys have been real nice to me.”

  “You were hungry, we got you a pizza—”

  “Yeah, and a Coke!”

  “We even let you step outside for a smoke, right?”

  “Yeah, you guys have been great!”

  “So you’re talking now because you want to.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I want to.”

  “She was your teacher, right?”

  “Yeah, she was. I really messed up in her class. I really messed up now too. Man, I’m sorry.”

  “I know you are. And I know you want to fix it. For her. For Miss Pietrisinski.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I want to do. For her. For Jenny.”

  The way he said her name: affectionately. It made Moira’s skin crawl. Because it made no sense. And it was unmistakable.

  Ana and Moira talked about it only a little on the way home. Ana said, “Where do these people come from?” And Moira answered, “I don’t even want to know.”

  “He was just so stupid you had to feel sorry for him,” said Ana.

  “I don’t,” said Moira. “He’s a perverted animal.”

  “I know, I know,” said Ana quickly. “But . . . just . . . I don’t know. I agree.”

  They drove in silence for a moment and then spoke of other things: how fun Ms. Poochie’s used to be; the night she’d met Eddie there; how differently men and women were expected to behave then. They analyzed Sexy G, who (Moira had forgotten if she ever knew) was actually named Jonathan. Ana thought he was unstable; he had never been married but had a couple of kids with different women. “I think he’s the kind of guy who’s always in a feud with his neighbors,” she said.

  When Moira got home, she had plenty of time to make dinner, but there wasn’t much to work with: spaghetti and a can of tomato sauce, fortunately a decent onion and some sausage in the freezer, plus Parmesan. Basil from out in the yard, that made it. Eddie was satisfied, she could tell. They ate changing the channels, talking only a little. She knew his moods, the intent look in his eye when he was feeling something powerfully and didn’t want to talk about it. The guy he worked for could be a prick even though he used to be a friend. A long time ago.

  She waited until a commercial before talking to him about the case of Ms. Pietrisinski and Mark Carter. She didn’t mean to talk about it, and not really because of the rule that you weren’t supposed to. She thought he would just say something nasty about granny poon. But he didn’t. When she repeated the words, “He raped me on my father’s ground,” he was silent, but his expression changed, and she could sense him responding to the dignity of it.

  “Sick bastard,” he finally said. “Doing that to an old woman!”

  “Yeah,” she said. “But there was something else too. I felt like there was history between them. Something dark that went way back. They knew each other. You could tell in the way they spoke. The way he said her name.” And she repeated it, the affectionate way Mark Carter spoke the woman’s name.

  “Damn,” said Eddie. “It’s a love story. That old lady gave him the best sex he ever had, worth every minute of prison! The sick bastard!”

  And then the show came on again; the night continued. Moira didn’t object to his words, not then. She even felt a strange truth in them, something twisted and potent that flashed and then blended into the humming texture of life. But later, when they were in bed, she brought it up again. She said, “That’s not true, what you said. About the case today. She didn’t give him anything. He beat it out of her.” At first Eddie didn’t know what she was talking about. Then he said, “I know that. It was just a figure of speech. Don’t pick over my words.” And they turned in their separate directions to sleep.

  But Moira stayed awake. Finally, at three o’clock she put on her robe and went downstairs. Even though it was cold, she went out onto the screened porch and sat there, hearing Mark Carter’s weirdly boyish voice against the grandeur of the old woman’s scorn, her epic words. Her torn body. A love story. She felt a surge of something she could not identify, coming up in her with frightening strength. Once again she sensed the night smells, the delicious basil, the passionate lilacs, the complexity of invisible things. But these things did not calm her. With rare acuity she recalled Tanya, her little baby, the feel of her body, her tiny hands and nails. She remembered the joy of her love and her sickening fear for the infant’s vulnerability. Tears sprang to her eyes and ran down her face. Helpless love, prophetic fear; in a sudden swift turn, these feelings blended inexplicably with rage so powerful that she stood up, her blood rushing. She felt like she wanted to smash something or someone. But who? What? She imagined smashing the rapist in the face and body, but that did not satisfy the feeling. No, she did not want to smash that sad, stupid man. Then who? What? She sat in the cold, breathing deeply and waiting for the feeling to go away. She sat for a long time.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo © Derek Shapton

  Mary Gaitskill is an award-winning novelist, essayist, and short story writer. A nominee for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the PEN/Faulkner, her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, Esquire, Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories.